British Pacifism and the British Dislike of Theory

Written: Written in June 1915
Published:
First published on July 27, 1924, in Pravda No. 169.
Published according to the manuscript.
Source:Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
[197[4]],
Moscow,
Volume 21,
pages 260-265.
Translated:Transcription\Markup:D. Walters and R. CymbalaPublic Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
2003
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.

Political freedom has hitherto been far more extensive in
Britain than elsewhere in Europe. Here, more than anywhere else, the
bourgeoisie are used to governing and know how to govern. The relations
between the classes are more developed and in many respects clearer than in
other countries. The absence of conscription gives the people more liberty
in their attitude towards the war in the sense that anyone may
refuse to join the colours, which is why the government (which in Britain is
a committee, in its purest form, for managing the affairs of the
bourgeoisie) are compelled to bend every effort to rouse
“popular” enthusiasm for the war. That aim could never be
attained without a radical change in the laws, had the mass of proletarians
not been completely disorganised and demoralised by the desertion to a
Liberal, i.e., bourgeois, policy, of a minority of the best placed, skilled
and unionised workers. The British trade unions comprise about one-fifth of
all wage workers. Most trade union leaders are Liberals; Marx long ago
called them agents of the bourgeoisie.

All these features of Britain help us, on the one hand, better to
understand the essence of present-day social-chauvinism, that essence being
identical in autocratic and democratic countries, in militarist and
conscription-free countries; on the other hand, they help us to appreciate,
on the basis of facts, the significance of that compromise with
social-chauvinism which is expressed, for instance, in the extolling of the
slogan of peace, etc.

The Fabian Society is undoubtedly the most consummate expression of
opportunism and of Liberal-Labour policy.
The reader should look into the correspondence of Marx and Engels with
Sorge (two Russian translations of which have appeared). There he will
find an excellent characterisation of that society given by Engels, who
treats Messrs. Sidney Webb & Co. as a gang of bourgeois rogues who
would demoralise the workers, influence them in a counter-revolutionary
spirit. One may vouch for the fact that no Second International leader
with any responsibility and influence has ever attempted to refute this
estimation of Engels’s, or even to doubt its correctness.

Let us now compare the facts, leaving theory aside for
a moment. You will see that the Fabians’ behaviour during the war
(see, for instance, their weekly paper, The New
Statesman[2]), and
that of the German Social-Democratic Party, including Kautsky, are
identical. The same direct and indirect defence of
social-chauvinism; the same combination of that defence with a readiness to
utter all sorts of kindly, humane and near-Left phrases about peace,
disarmament, etc., etc.

The fact stands, and the conclusion to be drawn—however unpleasant
it may be to various persons—is inescapably and undoubtedly the
following: in practice the leaders of the present-day German
Social-Democratic Party, including Kautsky, are exactly the same kind of
agents of the bourgeoisie that Engels called the Fabians long ago. The
Fabians’ non-recognition of Marxism and its
“recognition” by Kautsky and Co. make no difference whatever in
the essentials, in the facts of politics; the only thing proved is that some
writers, politicians, etc., have converted Marxism into Struvism. Their
hypocrisy is not a private vice with them; in individual cases they
may be highly virtuous heads of families; their hypocrisy is the result of
the objective falseness of their social status: they are supposed to
represent the revolutionary proletariat, whereas they are actually agents
charged with the business of inculcating bourgeois, chauvinist ideas in the
proletariat.

The Fabians are more sincere and honest than Kautsky and Co., because
they have not promised to stand for revolution; politically, however, they
are of the same kidney.

The long history of Britain’s political freedom and the developed
condition of her political life in general, and of her
bourgeoisie in particular, have resulted in various shades of
bourgeois opinion being able to find rapid, free and open expression in
that country’s new political organisations. One such organisation is
the Union of Democratic Control, whose secretary and treasurer is
E. D. Morel, now a regular contributor to The Labour Leader, the
Independent Labour Party’s central organ. This individual was for
several years the Liberal Party’s nominee for the Birkenhead
constituency. When Morel came out against the war, shortly after
its outbreak, the committee of the Birkenhead Liberal association notified
him, in a letter dated October 2, 1914, that his candidature would no
longer be acceptable, i.e., he was simply expelled from the Party. Morel
replied to this in a letter of October 14, which he subsequently published
as a pamphlet entitled The Outbreak of the War. Like a number of
other articles by Morel, the pamphlet exposes his government,
proving the falseness of assertions that the rape of Belgium’s
neutrality caused the war, or that the war is aimed at the destruction of
Prussian imperialism, etc., etc. Morel defends the programme of
the Union of Democratic Control—peace, disarmament, all territories
to have the right of self-determination by plebiscite, and the democratic
control of foreign policy.

All this shows that as an individual, Morel undoubtedly deserves credit
for his sincere sympathy with democracy, for turning away from the jingoist
bourgeoisie to the pacifist bourgeoisie. When Morel cites the facts to prove
that his government duped the people when it denied the existence of secret
treaties although such treaties actually existed; that the British
bourgeoisie, as early as 1887, fully realised that Belgium’s
neutrality would inevitably be violated in the event of a Franco-German war,
and emphatically rejected the idea of interfering (Germany not yet being a
dangerous competitor!); that in a number of books published before the war
French militarists such as Colonel Boucher quite openly acknowledged the
existence of plans for an aggressive war by France and Russia
against Germany; that the well-known British military authority, Colonel
Repington, admitted in 1911 in the press, that the growth of
Russian armaments after 1905 had been a threat to Germany—when Morel
reveals all this, we cannot but admit that
we are dealing with an
exceptionally honest and courageous bourgeois, who is not afraid to break
with his own party.

Yet anyone will at once concede that, after all, Morel is a bourgeois,
whose talk about peace and disarmament is a lot of empty phrases, since
without revolutionary action by the proletariat there can be neither a
democratic peace nor disarmament. Though he has broken with the Liberals on
the question of the present war, Morel remains a Liberal on all other
economic and political issues. Why is it, then, that when Kautsky, in
Germany, gives a Marxist guise to the selfsame bourgeois phrases
about peace and disarmament, this is not considered hypocrisy on his part,
but stands to his merit? Only the undeveloped character of political
relations and the absence of political freedom prevent the formation in
Germany, as rapidly and smoothly as in Britain, of a bourgeois league for
peace and disarmament, with Kautsky’s programme.

Let us, then, admit the truth that Kautsky’s stand is that of a
pacifist bourgeois, not of a revolutionary Social-Democrat.

The events we are living amidst are great enough for us to be courageous
in recognising the truth, no matter whom it may concern.

With their dislike of abstract theory and their pride in their
practicality, the British often pose political issues more directly, thus
helping the socialists of other countries to discover the actual content
beneath the husk of wording of every-kind (including the
“Marxist”). Instructive in this respect is the pamphlet
Socialism and
War,[1]
published before the war by the jingoist paper,
The Clarion. The pamphlet contains an anti-war
“manifesto” by Upton Sinclair, the U.S. socialist, and also a
reply to him from the jingoist Robert Blatchford, who has long adopted
Hyndman’s imperialist viewpoint.

Sinclair is a socialist of the emotions, without any theoretical
training. He states the issue in “simple” fashion; incensed by
the approach of war, he seeks salvation from it in socialism.

“We are told,” Sinclair writes, “that the socialist
movement is yet too weak so that we must wait for its evolution. But
evolution is working in the hearts of men; we are its instruments, and if
we do not struggle, there is no evolution. We are told that the movement
[against war] would be crushed out; but I declare my faith that the
crushing out of any rebellion which sought, from motive of sublime
humanity to prevent war, would be the greatest victory that socialism has
ever gained—would shake the conscience of civilisation and rouse the
workers of the world as nothing in all history has yet done. Let us not be
too fearful for our movement nor put too much stress upon numbers and the
outward appearances of power. A thousand men aglow with faith and
determination are stronger than a million grown cautious and respectable;
and there is no danger to the socialist movement so great as the danger of
becoming an established institution.”

This, as can be seen, is a naïve, theoretically unreasoned, but
profoundly correct warning against any vulgarising of socialism, and a call
to revolutionary struggle.

"It is capitalists and militarists who make wars. That is
true. . . ,” he says. Blatchford is as anxious for peace and for
socialism taking the place of capitalism as any socialist in the world. But
Sinclair will not convince him, or do away with the facts with
“rhetoric and fine phrases”. “Facts, my dear Sinclair, are
obstinate things, and the German danger is a fact.” Neither the British
nor the German socialists are strong enough to prevent war, and
“Sinclair greatly exaggerates the power of British socialism. The
British socialists are not united; they have no money, no arms, no
discipline”. The only thing they can do is to help the
British Government build up the navy; there is not, nor can there be, any
other guarantee of peace.

Neither before nor since the outbreak of the war have the chauvinists
ever been so outspoken in Continental Europe. In Germany it is not frankness
that is prevalent, but Kautsky’s hypocrisy and playing at
sophistry. The same is true of Plekhanov. That is why it is so instructive
to cast a glance at the situation in a more advanced country, where nobody
will be taken in with sophisms or a travesty of Marxism. Here
issues are
stated in a more straightforward and truthful manner. Let us learn from the
“advanced” British.

Sinclair is naïve in his appeal, although fundamentally it is a very
correct one; he is naïve because he ignores the development of mass
socialism over the last fifty years and the struggle of trends within
socialism; he ignores the conditions for the growth of revolutionary action
when an objectively revolutionary situation and a revolutionary organisation
exist. The “emotional” approach cannot make up for that. The
intense and bitter struggle between powerful trends in socialism, between
the opportunist and revolutionary trends, cannot be evaded by the use of
rhetoric.

Blatchford speaks out undisguisedly, revealing the most covert argument
of the Kautskyites and Co., who are afraid to tell the truth. We are still
weak, that is all, says Blatchford; but his outspokenness at once lays bare
his opportunism, his jingoism. It at once becomes obvious that he serves the
bourgeoisie and the opportunists. By declaring that socialism is
“weak” he himself weakens it by preaching an
anti-socialist, bourgeois, policy.

Like Sinclair, but conversely, like a coward and not like a fighter, like
a traitor and not like the recklessly brave, he, too, ignores the conditions
making for a revolutionary situation.

As for his practical conclusions, his policy (the rejection of
revolutionary action, of propaganda for such action and preparation of it),
Blatchford, the vulgar jingoist, is in complete accord with
Plekhanov and Kautsky.

Marxist words have in our days become a cover for a total renunciation of
Marxism; to be a Marxist, one must expose the “Marxist
hypocrisy” of the leaders of the Second International, fearlessly
recognise the struggle of the two trends in socialism, and get to the bottom
of the problems relating to that struggle. Such is the conclusion to be
drawn from British relationships, which show us the Marxist essence
of the matter, without Marxist words.